Word Classes for Primary English

What Are Nouns?

A noun is sometimes called a ‘naming word’.  Nouns refer to a thing, person, place, object, quality, event, substance, animal, etc.  Essentially, if it has a name, that name is almost certainly a noun.  Nouns can be split into a few other types, such as:

Common nouns — these are words for general things/people/objects, e.g., ‘hamster’, ‘country’, ‘teacher’.  You don’t need to capitalise common nouns: pupils can see this for themselves with this Common Nouns Worksheet.

Proper nouns — words for specific things/people/objects, e.g. ‘Nibbles’, ‘France’, ‘Mr Johnson’.
Proper nouns should always be capitalised: this Proper Nouns Worksheet will develop pupils’ ability to capitalise proper nouns correctly.

Concrete nouns — these refer to something that is ‘real’ or material, e.g., ‘hat’, ‘lorry’, ‘office’.

Abstract nouns — these refer to an idea, feeling or something intangible, e.g., ‘love’ or ‘joy’.

Collective nouns are another type of noun (and my personal favourite) — these are nouns that you’ll most likely notice when you spot a weird one being used to refer to a group of animals.
E.g.  ‘a wisdom of wombats’, ‘a smack of jellyfish’ or ‘a flamboyance of flamingos’.

You can learn more about concrete, abstract and collective nouns in this PowerPoint.

What Are Verbs?

Verbs are also known as ‘doing words’ or ‘action words’.  They are usually used in sentences to tell you what is happening or what something (usually a noun) is doing, e.g. “My horse is playing basketball”.

Year 2 pupils will enjoy this PowerPoint about verbs, and there’s a helpful verb Video on CGP+ too. 

As children develop their writing skills, they’ll be encouraged to use more interesting verbs — e.g., ‘devours’ instead of ‘eats’ and ‘sprinted’ instead of ‘ran’.

Later in KS2, children will be introduced to modal verbs.  These are verbs that express possibility or necessity, e.g. “I must jog in the Sahara Desert” or “That cat should wear a bow tie”.

What Are Adjectives?

Adjectives are ‘describing words’ — they describe something, e.g., its size, shape, colour, age, smell.  They are usually placed right in front of a noun to give the reader more information about it.  Numbers can be adjectives when they describe a quantity (e.g., ‘twelve’ is an adjective in the sentence: ‘I ate twelve courgettes last night’).  Adjectives can even make comparisons: words like smallest, largest, hairiest, teeny-tiniest are all adjectives.

KS1 pupils can explore adjectives themselves with this Adjectives PowerPoint, (ft. Alvin the Adjective Monster) and this Using Adjectives Worksheet.

As with verbs, children will be asked to use more interesting adjectives as they develop their writing skills.  This will make their writing more exciting (as they won’t repeat the same describing word all the time, e.g., ‘the big car… the big house…the big plate’), and it can help to build vocabulary too, as they’ll learn synonyms for more and more words.

What Are Adverbs?

The clue is in the name here — adverbs ‘add’ extra information to a verb (“They whispered quietly”). 
This handy Adverbs Video explains more.

Adverbs aren’t a one-trick pony though: they can also help to describe an adjective (She was very tired”), a different adverb (“She was surprisingly very tired”) or a whole sentence (“Sadly, she was very tired”. 

Generally, adverbs will give you extra detail about the place, time, order or way that something happens.
Help Year 3 pupils master adverbs with this Using Adverbs Worksheet.
 

Get ready — here comes a second wave of word classes. These ones are a bit more advanced.

What Are Prepositions?

Prepositions tell you information about how a noun relates to something else in the sentence.  For example, a preposition could tell you that: “The box is ‘on / under / next to’ the table”, or that “Jake ate an ice cream before his breakfast”.  As these examples show, prepositions usually describe relationships involving place (where), time (when) or cause (why).

Let pupils try this Worksheet to test their prepositional senses (it even has a Foundation Level version for less confident learners).

Prepositions usually appear before a noun that they are working their magic on, so you shouldn’t need to try too hard to hunt them down.  They can be tricky to explain though, so a good way to familiarise people with them is to use commands — these often include prepositions.  For examples “Put that in the bin” / “Crawl under the table”.  Or you can just watch this nifty Video…

What Are Determiners?

These are (usually) short words that change the meaning or specificity of a noun.  There are several types of determiners, including:

Articles — can be definite (‘the’) when introducing a specific noun, or indefinite (‘a/an’) when introducing a general noun

Quantifier — refers to an amount, e.g., ‘this / some / a bit / none / many’

Demonstrative — gives information about which specific noun is being referred to, e.g., “Kevin likes this turtle / that turtle / all turtles / those turtles.”

Possessive — introduces a noun that someone owns, e.g., ‘his / her / my / your / our / their’
Pupils can start using determiners for themselves in this animal-themed Worksheet.

What Are Pronouns?

Pronouns are words that replace nouns when the noun being referred to is already known.  They let us avoid repeating nouns over and over — this can help writing to flow more effortlessly.

This feels a bit stilted:
“Priya bought some shoes. Priya put the shoes on, but the shoes did not fit Priya well.”

By using pronouns, we can make it read much better:
“Priya bought some shoes. She put the shoes on, but the shoes did not fit her well.”

This Pronouns PowerPoint introduces Year 4 pupils to pronouns.

There are many different types of pronouns, but three of the main ones are:

Personal pronouns — probably the most common type.  They include pronouns like: “I / you / she / he / it / we / me / they / him / her / us / them / our / your / its”.

Possessive pronouns — similar to personal pronouns but show ownership.  They include words like ‘my / his / hers / yours / theirs / ours’.

Relative pronouns — include words like ‘that / which / who’ and are also fairly common — they introduce a subordinate clause (part of a sentence that doesn’t make sense on its own) that describes a noun. E.g., “The woman who drives the bus eats hot dogs for breakfast.”

Year 5-6 pupils can start working with possessive and relative pronouns in this PowerPoint.

What Are Conjunctions?

Often called ‘joining words’, these do exactly what they say on the tin.  Conjunctions connect parts of a sentence (clauses). 

This Year 3 PowerPoint and this Year 5 PowerPoint are excellent introductions to conjunctions for both Lower or Upper KS2 (and if you wanted a KS1 conjunctions PowerPoint, look no further).

The two main types of conjunction children will meet at KS2 are coordinating and subordinating conjunctions.

Coordinating conjunctions — include words like ‘for / and / nor / but / or / yet / so’, and you’ll see, hear and use them all the time.  They are used to join together two parts of a sentence that are equally important, e.g. “I like chocolates and I like sweets.” Check out this Video for an explanation of coordinating conjunctions with some examples.

Subordinating conjunctions — include words like ‘if / after / when / although / before / since / while / despite’.  They are used to join together a main clause (part of a sentence that makes sense on its own) and a subordinate clause (part of a sentence that doesn’t make sense on its own — it needs to be attached to a main clause). E.g., “That koala is going to poke me after lunch.”

This space-based Worksheet challenges pupils to write their own subordinating conjunctions.

You might have noticed that some words can be conjunctions and prepositions, e.g., ‘before’.  Don’t panic.  This is fine — it’s just a fun (and not at all confusing) quirk of the English language…

This brings us to the end of our whistlestop tour of word classes in Primary English.  If you’re eager to dig into more educational resources and get children actively practising their word class knowledge, then CGP+ has bags of Primary English resources for KS1 and KS2 to help you.

Ta-ra for now, and remember you’ll always stay (word) classy with CGP+.